[Simtrainer-l] PIRATES Help

[Christine Bouck]

Hello. I am in the process of teaching PIRATES to a group of 9th grade
students in a pull-out special education class specifically for teaching
study skills (they are in regular classes for their core subjects). We have
been working on this strategy since Halloween and are still working on the
controlled practice tests. I go over it and go over it and they just don't
seem to be making any progress. I even had them create posters or Power
Point projects describing the strategy and the reasons for using it. As I'm
grading these projects I'm noticing that they really didn't put much effort
into them, much like the CP tests. (In fact, I have difficulty motivating
them to do much of anything but I digress.)

PIRATES is always a longer strategy-more steps equals more time to teach
it. But I've never encountered a group of students who were so reluctant to
complete a strategy. Usually PIRATES is a favorite because of all the fun
things you can do with the mnemonic and because it's so useful. Does anyone
have any ideas as to something I can do to help excite my students or
somehow get them on board? I've shown the results, shared personal stories
of students I've known who've successfully used it, and even had one
student in the class tell the others that he used one of the ACE guessing
techniques on a test and it worked. I even bribed them with the promise of
2 days of a murder mystery game if they all finish the test before the end
of the quarter. Nothing is working. Any help or advice would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks so much.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ku.edu/pipermail/simtrainer-l/attachments/20161213/193ea9af/attachment.html>